Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India's Liberation Struggle

Decolonizing Anarchism looks at the history of South Asian struggles against colonialism and neocolonialism, highlighting lesser-known dissidents as well as iconic figures. This approach reveals an alternate narrative of decolonization, in which achieving a nation-state is not the objective. Maia Ramnath also studies the anarchist vision of alternate society, which closely echoes the concept of total decolonization on the political, economic, social, cultural, and psychological planes. This facilitates not only a reinterpretation of the history of anticolonialism, but insight into the meaning of anarchism itself. Maia Ramnath teaches at New York University and is a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies.

Maia Ramnath offers a refreshingly different perspective on anticolonial movements in India, not only by focusing on little-remembered anarchist exiles such as Har Dayal, Mukerji and Acharya but more important, highlighting the persistent trend that sought to strengthen autonomous local communities against the modern nationstate. While Gandhi, the self-proclaimed philosophical anarchist, becomes a key figure in this antiauthoritarian history, there are other more surprising cases that Ramnath brings to light. A superbly original book.
-Partha Chatterjee, author of Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy

"This is a stunningly impactful and densely researched book. Maia Ramnath has offered a vital contribution to our understanding of the long historical entanglement between liberation struggles, anticolonialism, and the radical movement of oppressed peoples against the modern nation-state. She audaciously reframes the dominant narrative of Indian radicalism by detailing its explosive and ongoing symbiosis with decolonial anarchism."
-Dylan Rodriguez, author of Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition